


Odd-Job Girl

by Lex_Munro



Series: Stories From the Fateverse [29]
Category: Cable and Deadpool, Deadpool (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Sci-fi, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Artificial Intelligence, Fictional language, Gen, Language-geekery, Original Character(s), Rule 63, Talking Arachnids, Technobabble
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-25
Updated: 2018-05-25
Packaged: 2019-05-13 18:14:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14753825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lex_Munro/pseuds/Lex_Munro
Summary: Despite being Keeper of one of the most powerful Nodes in the Network, Mina is an odd-job girl.  Her adventures with Eight-ball aren't quite as hair-raising as their first meeting.





	1. The Bookwyrm

**Author's Note:**

> This is a collection of snippets from Mina's new job.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If Mina's going to keep working for the Network, she'll need to learn a Trans-Universal Language. Time to visit the Librarian.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so, this has actually been gathering dust. it spawned from a short conversation with Moriarty about the Fidelis Effect and what other interesting things it could do (aside from the Collector’s Grotto and the knowledge that Wades share). as a result, Eight-ball took Mina to meet the Librarian.
> 
> the language here (Aresian, Arien, whatever–the language that evolved into the Ak'virri language in the Waking Man universe) is entirely Moriarty’s. i’m told that the Librarian says “Ah, you wish to be able to teach it?” and Eight-ball replies with “Yes.”
> 
>  **warnings:** AU/multiverse, sci-fi, dimensional travel, yellow boxes, giant spiders (welllll, technically not a spider), pg-13 swears.

**The Bookwyrm**

 

Mina was singing and drumming to Rock Band when Eight-ball suddenly flashed and beeped.

_~Sorry to interrupt.  Incoming assignment.~_

She paused the game and took off her headset.  “Okay, look, I’ve been meaning to ask—what the fuck do I get outta this, aside from a used cat and a disembodied friend who can tell the futures?”

_~You get to travel to far-off exotic places, meet new and exciting people…~_

_And then kill them?_

“Travel opportunities don’t pay the TiVo bill.”

_~I could hack you a paycheck, if you like.  Your world makes it incredibly easy to invent or redirect money.~_

“Pleasekaythanks,” Mina said.  “Now.  Assignment?”

_~A different Wade needs a specific book that doesn’t exist in his timeline.  So we’re going to the Bookwyrm to ask the Librarian’s permission to borrow a copy for him.~_

“Bookworm?  Like the larvae that eat old paper, or the magical millipede thingies that eat words?”

_~Neither.~_

_Well, I’m stumped.  Unless it’s a worm made of books.  Crawly books!_

Ew, shut up.

_~You’ll see when we get there.  The Network’s opening a gravitic conduit for us in five minutes, so get your boots and your carry-all.~_

Not-quite-five-minutes later, Mina was ready to go.  Shoes, phone, keys, hand grenade, Mr. Bang Bang…just the essentials, really.  Right on schedule, a Stargate-y hole opened up and moved to surround her.  With a sensation of bathing in seltzer water, she was elsewhere.

_Traveling without moving!  Does this involve orange crack that makes people’s eyes glow blue?_

“Core Control, this is Dabon,” said the human-ish thing sitting at a control panel nearby.  “Conduit transfer completed as scheduled.  Keeper and Node are on-site.”

Mina was trying not to stare, but the thing looked a lot like a little grey alien.  “Uh, hi,” she said.

“Welcome to Dabon,” the thing said pleasantly.  “The Bookwyrm has just arrived.  The nearest boarding platform is outside this door and to your left.  Mind the gap.”

Mina smiled in thanks and followed the little grey dude’s directions.  Out.  Left.

“Holy frijoles!”

The boarding platform was just like an ell platform or a monorail platform—a stretch of standing room that happened to be a long way off the ground.  In this case, it was a frigging cliff, and instead of a train there was a huge white-gold serpentine dragon thing.

_Alabaster.  That’s the color you’re looking for._

Overhead, an intercom spoke in a few weird languages before coming around to English.

_~Bookwyrm now boarding on platforms one through thirteen.  Last call to board Bankwyrm on platforms fourteen through eighteen.  Schoolwyrm arriving on platforms fourteen through twenty in exactly four minutes.  Mind the gap.~_

“So,” said Mina, slightly stunned.

_Wyrm with a Y. Well, that makes sense now._

It doesn’t.  What the fuck.

 _~Go on,~_ said Eight-ball.  _~And, like they said, mind the gap.  It’s a fucking long way down.~_

Only a few others (mostly the grey-alien-dudes, but a human-looking chick and a pair of Skrulls, too) were boarding at that platform.  Mina waited her turn and stepped up to the door in the side of the serpent.  From that close, she could see that it was made of some kind of stone, but it moved slightly, as if it were alive.  She looked down through the six-inch space between the platform and the gently swaying structure and saw nothing but a lot of air and a lot of water far below.  Far like ‘Wile E. Coyote falls off a cliff with a whistling noise’ far.

Gal could break a neck hitting water from this high up.

So Mina took a generous step forward.

The inside of the Bookwyrm was lit with a soft but bright light, like daylight filtered through white curtains.  It was cylindrical (of course) and covered with books, like some library tower turned on its side, with the walkway somehow floating along down the middle flanked with little benches and chairs.  There was a continuous low creaking, like timbers shifting on a ship at sea.

“Do we ring a bell or something?” Mina asked, watching other people mill about and settle on the benches with books that were lying around.

_~The Librarian should be on her way.  She makes the rounds when the wyrm’s stopped.~_

“You’ve been here before?”

_~Uh.  Sort of.~_

Right.  Past lives, and all that.

A rhythmic sort of clicking sound caught Mina’s attention, and she turned to see the biggest damn spider climbing along the shelves.

_Holy Shelob!_

Bigger than Shelob; Shelob only looked big because hobbits are three feet tall.

“Ah, hello, hello,” said the spider.  “You must be Eight-ball.  And this is your Keeper?”

_~Yes.  Mina, this is the Librarian.  Say hello.~_

“Big damn spider,” said Mina.  After a moment’s thought, she realized this was probably rude enough to get her attacked by said big damn spider.

“I beg your pardon, miss,” the Librarian said in an offended tone.  “I’m no more a spider than you are a chimpanzee.  My kind are arachnids, yes, but that’s where the similarity ends.  There are over a hundred sentient species of arachnid, and _none_ of them are spiders.”

Mina held the question in for a whopping five seconds before she burst out with, “How many are ticks?”

The Librarian’s little mouth-claws ( _Mandibles, honey, mandibles._ ) wiggled.  “Specifically ticks?  Twenty-two.  Forty-nine acarina in all.  No, my kind are _not_.  Now, I’ve been told you need a book.”

“Not us, actually,” Mina replied.  “Some guy who is-and-isn’t me.  He needs a book.  Apparently we can only get that book here.”

“ _In_ correct,” said the Librarian, scaling the shelving until she (it?) was perched on the ceiling.  “Any book that exists here exists elsewhere.  The Bookwyrm is not a library.  It is _the libraries_ —all of them.  Any book ever made finds itself somewhere in here.  But it has to be a book, because that’s how the Fidelis aura works.  The Bookwyrm began full of empty books, and those books gradually became similar books that _weren’t_ empty.  It’s all very metaphysical, and I don’t really follow it well, but that’s not my job.”

_No, your job is to stamp books.  Eight at a time._

“At any rate, there is no such thing as a book that can only be found here.  What you’re after is a book that doesn’t exist _where you’re going_.”

“Harvestmen,” Mina said with a snap of her fingers.  “That’s what you remind me of.”

“Opiliones,” corrected the Librarian.  “Specifically trogulus sapientia, which is a terribly vague and rather pretentious name for a species, even if you don’t say it in Latin, but ‘homo sapiens’ isn’t any better, so I don’t think we’ll spend time splitting any hairs over it, hm?  Are you after a specific book, Eight-ball?  Or only a subject?”

_~We need a visual dictionary of dialects from the Aries constellation.~_

The Librarian clicked her mouth-claws again.  “Ah, _hads dalla moch rea_?”

 _~_ Sah. _~_

Hesitantly, the Librarian skittered along the shelves, one long leg trailing over the spines of the books before plucking a few out.  Somehow, the rest of the books stayed in the shelves.  On the ceiling.  “Let’s see, then…  Are we talking first contact or teaching a bunch of pilgrims?”

_~First contact.~_

“This one, then,” she said, and passed Mina a thick volume bound in bluish leather.  “Though if your Keeper’s at all interested, she might like this one for herself…”  And she waved a smaller book.

_~Yes, please.~_

Mina pouted at the Node.  “Sure, why not?  I can always use more languages.  The better to know whether they’re shouting ‘hurray, it’s Deadpool!’ or ‘kill the heretic!’”

The book’s title (in _large_ , _friendly_ letters) was ‘ _So You Want to Learn a Trans-Universal Language_ ,’ and it had apparently been published by the Skip BabelFish Publishing House.  The first page started with a caution about using ‘hiya’ as a greeting, since it sounded just like the word that began all formal legal accusations in the Aries systems.  It went on to say that the word for murder sounded like ‘moo-cow,’ and should _not_ be laughed at under any circumstances.  By contrast, the appropriate general greeting was ‘hau ena,’ which meant ‘my hand is empty’ ( _I come in peace, ell-oh-ell…_ ), and the word that sounded like ‘murder’ was a kind of runny porridge.

“My kinda language lessons,” Mina snorted.

“Well, it’s a practical sort of language to know,” said the Librarian.  “So, naturally, there are practical guides to it.  The ancient Arienite Empire was unmatched in the Orion Spur for so long that they didn’t even notice when Sol’s planets became capable of supporting carbon-based life.  After all, if you spend your days rushing off to make maps of places hundreds of miles from your house, you probably wouldn’t notice if some ants took up residence under your porch.  But since they—”

“The Orion-what-now?”

The Librarian peered at her.  “Oh, goodness—you work with the Network and you don’t even know basic Milky Way geography?  Hm.  Well, your galaxy has four major arms:  two big and two little.  Sol is located in a funny little branch on one of the smaller arms, about halfway between the edge of the main part of the galaxy and its center.  That funny little branch is called the Orion Spur.  Anyway, the Arienites conquered everything interesting in your galaxy several million years before the earliest ancestors of humans existed, and it just never occurred to them to check back and see if anything had become habitable since they first mapped it all.  Brilliant spacefarers, but terrible astronomers.”

Mina could feel her brain starting to glaze over slightly in self-defense.  “Ants under the porch,” she said in an agreeable tone.

She got the feeling her failure to be properly interested was annoying the Librarian.  “Hmph.  At any rate, the reason the Arienite dialects are important is that they’re essentially the same in every universe ever encountered by the Network.  Moreover, the Arienites consistently conquered the Milky Way galaxy in more than eighty percent of known timelines, distributed their culture more recently in at least a third, and actively administrate in nearly five percent of all known branches.”

_Dude.  Galactic empire._

“Does that involve a cumbersome Imperial Senate that some dude will want to usurp and dissolve so that he can be an evil lightning rod?” Mina asked.

“I have to go help someone else, now,” the Librarian said firmly, and climbed away.

 

**.End.**


	2. Blah-blah-blah History of a Galactic Empire, Whatever

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mina has been sent for more comprehensive language lessons, courtesy of Frey, who will flirt with literally anything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mina needed more friends, and at least one person who doesn't need an adjustment period when looking her in the face.  So.  Here she is, meeting a member of a semi-benign galactic empire that coexists with the Fidelis Network.  He's going to teach her how to not slaughter an artificial language that'll let her be understood by the time-traveling bigwigs of the multiverse.
> 
> **warnings:**   AU - Fateverse.  hard sci-fi.  technobabble.  invented language and assorted language geekery. language: pg-13 (primetime TV plus s***).
> 
> **pairing:**   none/gen.
> 
> **timeline:**   Network Operations 3652 (AD 6188), shortly after The Bookwyrm.
> 
> **disclaimer:**   Wade belongs to Marvel. Eight-ball and the Fateverse are mine.
> 
> **notes:**   1) Fraiere/Freyr/Frey is from the Arienite Empire (they started out in the Aries constellation, but now their seat of government is on a totally different planet that's known to most outsiders as Vanaheim).  They kind of view the Aesir/Asgardians as the rowdy little boys next door ('ah, kids these days, i remember when...'), and consider them almost as silly as humans.  2) in Norse myth, Freyr is a god of sunshine, prosperity, and phallic fertility *eyebrow waggle*.  3) boom.  using the fidelis effect to instantly grant knowledge, just like the way Wades all get such an epic instinctive grasp of the math behind ninja antics like shooting three dudes with one bullet or dodging raindrops.  4) the Vaniere/Vanir/Arienites probably would've been wiped out or subjugated by the Time Lords if the Daleks and Time Lords hadn't blown each other to smithereens in this universe.

**Blah-blah-blah History of a Galactic Empire, Whatever**

 

Mina watches the guy watching her.

He’s not staring, not gaping or gawking.

Just watching.

“Y’know, I’m good at the silence game, too,” she warns him.  “And I can out-stare a cat.”

He smiles a little.  For some reason, his beard makes her think of dwarves…

_Guy’s gotta be six-five._

Really tall dwarves.

_There’s a word for really tall dwarves._

Yeah?

_Vikings._

“I was waiting for you to speak first,” he tells her.  “Among my people, silence belongs to women—it is theirs to keep or break.”

“That’s the weirdest gender role thing I’ve heard all year.”

He laughs; it’s the kind of laugh that belongs at a long table with a roaring hearth and a bunch of drunk guys with axes.  “Yes, our ways often seem strange to you Earthians.”

“Lings.”

“Your pardon?”

“Earth _lings_.  But most people just lump all us humans together, whether we’re from earth or somewhere else.  So, obviously you’re not just a time-travelly-whatever like the rest of ‘em; you’re an actual alien.  Like, little-green-men-from-outer-space alien.”

“They call us Arienites—our originating colonies are in star systems that belong to the Aries sector of the galaxy as viewed from Earth.  We call ourselves _van-yeh-ree_ , which means ‘people.’  One of the races we uplifted calls us Vanir.”

“Does it still mean ‘people’?”

“I have no idea what Vanir means.  Perhaps it’s nonsense…just familiar sounds they’re more used to making.  I should have mentioned that it’s rude for me to ask your name until you offer it or ask for mine first.”

Mina blinks.

_Dilemma time!  Do we give him the full name or the name we actually want people to call us?_

“Willemina Wilson.”

He nods approvingly and says something that sounds like, “Wee-lahm-yeh-nah.”

“Okay, it actually sounds a lot less lame when you say it.”

“It’s a very traditional name, passed to the Aesir, and from them to the Earthian cultures.  In our language—er, _my_ language—it means ‘strong-willed protector.’  I would write it like so…”  He takes a pencil from some pocket and draws several curling shapes, connecting them with a line on one side.

_Dude, it’s like Sanskrit on steroids.  And sideways._

“And I am _Frah-yeh-reh_ , but the uplifted races know me as Frey.  Like so…”  He draws another word.  “It means ‘sunshine.’  You may laugh—many Earthians do.”

She shrugs.  “I don’t see how it’s any funnier than ‘Apollo’ or ‘Hyperion.’”

He seems to like her; he’s watching again, with a little curl of a grin picking up one corner of his mustache.

“Why aren’t you staring?” she asks.  “Most people stare.”

Frey clicks his tongue.  “What good is looking without seeing?  Staring is a pastime for the idle and ignorant.  If you’re going to look at something, look properly.  See the color of the eye, the curve of the mouth.  See when the embers of annoyance glow, or the sparkle of excitement shines.  I find your reflexive defiance fascinating, Yenna.”

“Mina.”

He looks puzzled, golden brows knitting.  “Mee-nah,” he tries.  “I’m sorry, but I cannot call you that—it sounds very like a word our children use to describe their bodily necessities.”

_Pfft.  Wee-wee McDoo-doo._

“Ooookay.  Yenna it is.”

_God, how much longer do we have to talk to this guy?_

“Shut up,” she tells her yellow boxes.  “I kinda like him.”

Frey just watches.

“Sorry, the yellow boxes.  They’re kinda bitchy sometimes.”

He nods.  “Quite all right.  My sister talks to birds, and complains about their manners, too.”

“Huh.”  She drums her fingers on the table.  “So, you Van-whatsits, you conquered the galaxy and picked some people and showed them which end of a bottle to drink out of?”

“Oh, we were poking our noses around other dimensions while our universe was still young.  We didn’t actually do much conquering—you’d be surprised how many useful planets out there were inhabited by nothing smarter or more threatening than water buffalo when we got to them.  Earth, for example.  Why, we’d already marked your planet as utterly uninteresting hundreds of millions of years ago.”  He makes a gesture over his shoulder, and some little grey-smocked young waiter runs up with a tankard.  “Much, much later, when we returned home to find that our neighbors had gone from banging rocks together to stabbing each other, we decided there might be some merit to reinvestigating some of those worlds.”

“That’s neighbors for ya.  One day, they’re asking for a cup o’ sugar, next day they’re threatening to file a noise complaint about all the screaming and gunfire.”

Frey seems confused by the comment.  He takes a long drink from the tankard.  “The Aesir aren’t the sort of race to complain of noise or violence, and my people very much prefer to ‘make love, not war.’”  He winks.

_Did he just…?_

He totally did.

Mina reaches out and grabs Eight-ball.  “Uh, ee-bee, are we in the Twilight Zone?”

_~Nope.  If you need me to give you a lecture on the open-mindedness of the multiverse at large and time-travelers in particular, it can wait until we’re not using up Fraiere’s time.  You’re supposed to be learning the Vanieri language.  Or Vanre, Arien, or Aresian, whatever you wanna call it.~_

Mina pouts.  “Okay, so I read a book that the Librarian gave me…I think I’ve still got it in the carry-all somewhere…”  She digs a bit, finds it lodged between Mr. Bang Bang’s spare mags and her little black book ( _It’s actually red, but let’s not quibble…_ ).  “Uh…‘So You Want to Learn a Trans-Universal Language.’”

Frey nods.  “For field agents who don’t take the mandatory language course at the Academy—usually because they have not been required to _go_ to the Academy—this is the standard guide.”

“But Eight-ball says my pronunciation’s mediocre and my sentence structure is shit.  And I still can’t read it, but I haven’t exactly sat down and made the effort, y’know?  I mean, I don’t even know why ee-bee wanted me to learn it in the first place, except that it’s apparently a mandatory thing, which I also didn’t know.”

“Ah, so it’s history you need first,” he says happily.  “Order yourself a drink, Yenna, for tales need drink to wash them down.”  He makes another gesture over his shoulder, and a different grey-smocked server shows up.

“Uh,” says Mina.  “D’you guys have slurpees?”

“Yes,” the guy says proudly.  “Our synths are programmed with a wide variety of foreign beverages.  Will that be cherry, grape, or root beer?”

_Cherry slurpees are foreign food in the future?!  This smacks of dystopia, madam!_

“Uh,” she says again.  “Cherry.  Foreign, really?”

“In our timeline, artificially-flavored frozen carbonated drinks were a novelty craze that lasted approximately ten years in the late twentieth century.  That was almost four thousand years ago.  Coming right up, miss.”

_The horror!_

Mina shudders.  “A world without slurpees.  I cannot even.”

Frey seems amused and bemused at the same time.

_Probably doesn’t have teh Internets._

“So,” she says.  “Before the history lesson, why Arien?  Or Aresian, or whatever?”

He sips his drink.  “My people and our language exist in every known branch of the timestream.  _Every_ known branch.  And our charts are more complete than the Network’s.  When you flit from one part of the stream to another, the people may change, the face of your world may change, the very laws of time and space my change, but there will always be someone who speaks my language.  English is uncertain, shifting like sands, but Vanre is absolute.”

“Wait, so you’re telling me—”

Mina’s slurpee arrives, domed lid and spoon-straw and all.  And it tastes perfect.

“Ohmygodyes,” she mumbles with her mouth full, and takes another long drink.  “Sorry.  You’re telling me that maybe English—or something like it—is a little different everywhere in the multiverse, but Vanre is always the same?”

Frey nods.

“That is trippy shit.  That is…like, mathematically super-improbable.”

He nods again.

“Somebody did it on purpose.”

A third nod, and a gleeful grin.  “Our language was altered extensively by design.  It was engineered to match a certain resonance phase, so that it self-propagates through Time’s flow.  Certain subjects act as beacons, receiving an inkling of the language—some of these gain such a clear understanding in this way as to teach others.  Once, an entire planet gained the language by simple occurrence of the Fidelis effect.”

“That’s the one where things suddenly resemble other things?”

“Yes.  In my language, we call it heh-ah yeet-lah—our nothing.  When you gain knowledge without learning, we say your nothing has come to visit.  When Time ripples and you perceive it, we say someone has been chasing your nothing.”

Mina thinks.  “So that’d be distinct from just general ‘nothing.’  It’s _my_ nothing, or _your_ nothing.  Should there be a capital letter, maybe?”

He writes again, in those curling sideways-shapes.  “Vanre does not make use of capitalization in the same way as English does.  Rather, we denote especially important words—such as names—with increasingly elaborate word separators.  It would be considered preposterously reverent to do this in reference to one’s nothing, bordering on laughable superstition.”

“But it’s responsible for things nobody really understands.”

“As are sunlight, and rainbows, and Time itself; yet these things are attributed to something higher, rather than worshipped in their own right.”

“There are people who worship time,” Mina scoffs, thinking of bureaucrats.

“It is not a healthy practice,” Frey warns her somberly.  “Time should be taken as water, as food, as air.  Cultivated, utilized, appreciated, and then accepted as a basic feature of life.  Your nothing is like your body, your brain, your shadow—a simple feature that we all have in some form.”

Chastised, Mina slurps her slurpee.

“History, then.  Ages ago—aeons, in some universes—my people mastered interstellar travel.  If you think this is easy, you don’t know very much about the way gravity works in the void between star systems.”

Mina bit back a smug retort about reading a lot of sci-fi novels (maybe too many).

“We explored almost compulsively,” Frey went on, “taking whatever resources we saw fit and colonizing wherever we chose.  We so greatly outmatched all other sentient life we encountered that we even ignored many races.  They were insignificant to us, or so we assumed in our arrogance.  Those who were evolved enough to communicate with us, we uplifted.  Then we learned how to move into the space between atoms, and how to slip from one eddy of Time’s current to another.  We met ourselves.  We exchanged knowledge.  We grew by leaps and bounds.  Over the course of a thousand years, we grew to understand our nothing so thoroughly that we could pass things to one another without traveling, and we learned how and why some things were easier to pass along.  Five great linguists worked for more than a year to alter our langauge so that it could spread from one person’s nothing to another’s like wildfire.  As Network Theorists describe it, the language itself has obtained solid phase.  It exists everywhere, identical at its core, adapting when necessary and passing those changes to everyone who knows it.”

“So, if I made up a word and taught enough people, everybody _else_ would suddenly know the word I made up?”

“Essentially.”

She set her slurpee down and said, very gravely, “Eight-ball, we’re starting a list of shit to teach the multiverse.”

_~Here we go again…~_ Eight-ball muttered.  _~You’re going to have to understand a lot more of the language before you can make up words in it.~_

“You heard him, Yoda.  Teach me the ways of the Force.”

Frey blinked at her uncomprehendingly.

“Let the language lessons begin!” she tried.

At that, he nodded.  “Very well.  The parts of speech and their roles in a sentence.”

 

**.End.**


End file.
